Customer Reviews

Robo sapiens: Evolution of a New Species

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Robo sapiens is a collection of short interviews with people from all over the field of robotics. Each interview is at most a couple of pages long and is accompanied by beautiful pictures as well as supplementary commentary by the interviewers. The interviews themselves are pretty lightweight. You'll get some idea of what people are working on in the field, but don't expect anything in depth. Overall the book is a good, lightweight read. You can pick it up and read an interview or two and then not touch it for a couple of days. Some reviews have suggested this is a bad thing, but I think it is exactly what the book intends to provide.The book itself is rather large and contains beautiful photographs that have an artistic element to them. This adds to the browseability of the book and makes it something you might want to leave out for others.

Fifty years ago at the beginning of modern computers scientists predicted that within a few years robots would do the housekeeping and then we would start to try and figure out intelligence tasks such as playing the game of chess. Today we realize that "Simple" tasks such as playing with a ball are much more difficult for artificial machines than many "intelligent" tasks such as playing a game of Chess. I believe that any attempt to produce a genuine artificial intelligence must first address the motor control aspects of our intelligence and therefore I was thrilled to see this book, which explore and glorify the robotics and the motor control research. In one look you are amazed by the modern technology, but then you look again and see that these robots are still struggling to achieve the very basic skills that every child can easily muster. Then you realize that this album really glorify the biological creatures that these robots strive to imitate. We have a long way to go before we reach the prediction of "robo sapience" which is defined in this book as "A hybrid species of human and robot with intelligence vastly superior to that of purely biological mankind". Nevertheless technology did make amazing leaps in the past and it might do it again in the future. I am looking forward to browse this book again at the end of the century with a semi artificial body and mind.

Indeed you don't have to agree with the authors' perspective, as suggested by another reviewer, and indeed, as the authors admit, it is not complete. Still it is a beautiful presentation of the robotics research of our days with magnificent pictures and a fascinating futuristic concept that is encapsulated by its title.

Let me conclude with the words of Sir Arthur C. Clarke from the back cover of the book: "This is one of the most mind-stretching-and frightening-book I've ever read. It's also a tour de force of photography: the images reveal a whole new order of creation about to come into existence. No one who has any interest in the future can afford to miss it."

In view of the news last week that Kevin Warwick, one of the roboticists talked about in this book, had a chip imbedded permanently under his skin, this book takes on a profound significance. The book includes interviews with some of the major researchers in robotics and artificial intelligence, and has many beautiful photographs. In addition to the news of Warwick's operation, other news of exciting advances in robotics have been reported in the technicial journals and in the news media in recent months. And with the advent of robot toys and a Hollywood movie about artificial intelligence, it seems that robotics has taken us by storm. These developments are indeed exciting, for those working in the field of artificial intelligence, and those that are not, and even though there is perhaps a long way to go before we are priveleged to be among autonomous thinking machines working and playing among us, we are witnessing a good beginning. Indeed we are very lucky to be in a time when the dreams of the researchers in artificial intelligence are finally beginning to be realized, even at a modest level. This book is, thankfully, optimistic in its appraisal of robotics, and as the name of it implies, it has a somewhat different viewpoint on its future. Robots, it contends, will not necessarily be separate independent entities possessing superior intelligence and physical capabilities. By taking on chips underneath their skin, by using hearing aids, by employing heart defibrillators, by reverse engineering the human brain, and by immersing other devices in their bodies, humans will (slowly?) evolve into a superposition of the biological and mechanical. The robots....

......will be us......

I bought this book for the pictures, and I'm not disappointed. The grainy pictures viewed in hard-to-find magazines, or worse, published only on the web, don't do justice to the amazing creations of robotics experimenters. My only (admittedly frivolous) complaint is that it's not true coffee-table-book sized. Packed with original content, Robo sapiens beats every other glossy general audience robot book I've ever seen.

They can climb stairs, juggle balls, open a door, smile engagingly, hear and see, swing like a monkey, crawl like a crab and swim like a fish. Who? Why the robots, of course. This startling picture book explores the amazing scope of robot capabilities. The photographs of the robots and their creators provide a unique picture of the dawn of these intelligent machines. The narratives are brief and to the point, explaining just enough but always remaining as support for the pictures. As I thumbed through this book, it became clear that the development of humanlike robots will come one project at a time, not by a thunderous breakthrough from a single genius working in a dark lab. Definitely buy this book; there's nothing quite like it.

The authors traveled a lot to get their interviews but the resulting book is a big disappointment. I got the impression that they were more interested in making some clever photos than producing a good piece of work on the subject of robotics. To be fair, there were a few items of interest but they didn't make the book worthwhile. The format of the book is interviews which makes the reading rather boring, the content disorganized, and any meaningful information very difficult to find. If you are interested in robotics, this book is not for you.

In Karel Capeks 1920 play "R.U.R." a factory populates the world with worker robots, meant to relieve humans from the hardships of work. But unfortunately the robots end up revolting against their masters, finally wiping out the human race.

Somehow, it seems that this theme has never left us. From the Robosaurus machine that prowls a parking lot of a Las Vegas casiono, showing off its ability to breathe fire and crush cars in its mighty claws, to Arnold Schwarzeneggers Terminators - robots are in western culture associated with a sense of doom. Never mind that humans false teeth, titanium hips, artificial eyes - are already making us beginning to resemble our machines, turning us halfways into cyborgs even today. No, Robots still feel kind of eery.
Roboticist Hugo de Garis puts its out in the open with his
"moral obligation" to raise the alarm of the fruits of his research (into artificial intelligent beings).
As it is stated in the book "The terrible fear, and great hope, is that we may lose some of our humanity. With good luck we might lose some of the powerty, fear and desperation that has always been the human lot. With bad luck we might lose ourselves"
Looking at the bright side - robots could be engineered to be moral. Robots could be saints. So I guess there is still hope.

Great book. Awesome pictures.

-Simon

In the 1980s everyone was excited about AI and robotics. Then people turned away because the reality didn't live up to the hype. These photographs will restore folks' wonder at the achievements in this field.

This book gives a non-technical overview of robotics today, written by non-technical people with the common man in mind. As a result, it is FUUUUUUUUN to read!!!! People who are skeptical of robotics progress -> READ THIS BOOK!

This book provides a great review of "who" has/is doing "what" in the robotics field. It provides a sound brief review of the field without too much depth, making it an enjoyable book for readers of all backgrounds. The pictures are great. It is a great book for robotics researchers. I believe it will be a collectors item 20 years from now.